Introducing the Vault 2010 Product Line

 

As part of its recent 2010 product launch, Autodesk has made major changes and improvements to its Vault and Productstream products. The main changes are:

• Renaming of the Autodesk Productstream product to Autodesk Vault Manufacturing
• Addition of the Vault Manufacturing and Vault Collaboration products. In order of increasing functionality and price, the Autodesk data management product line now consists of Vault, Vault Workgroup, Vault Collaboration and finally Vault Manufacturing.
• With Vault Workgroup on up, the product line now includes greatly enhanced document management capabilities that many users have been looking and asking for.
• Introduction of the requirement that all users connected to an Autodesk Data Management Server (ADMS) be using the same client software. In the past, customers could have some users with Vault and some with Productstream connecting to the same server. With the 2010 release, all users at a site must be using the same client software (Vault, Vault Workgroup, Vault Collaboration or Vault Manufacturing). This may be a major issue for some of our customers that will require further one-on-one discussion.

Autodesk Vault Workgroup (the next step up from standard Vault) adds the following capabilities:

• Release/revision management (as opposed to the more limited check in/check out and version management in standard Vault)
• Customizable lifecycle states to allow for transitions of files between states such as released, under change, in review, obsolete etc.
• Enhanced security to better control access to files based on folder location or lifecycle state. For example, you can allow shop floor people to only see files in certain folders or in a released state.
• Automatic file naming based on your file naming/numbering schemes
• Enhanced document property configuration and editing within the Workgroup client rather than being limited to only file properties and titleblock attributes as with standard Vault
• Customizable document categories to allow different types of documents to have different revision schemes, lifecycle states and transitions, associated properties etc., thus making it much easier to expand the use of Workgroup to other document types and company departments
• Batch plotting including the ability to select a top level assembly and automatically plot all drawings associated with that assembly and its children

Autodesk Vault Collaboration then adds additional major features such as:

• An Internet Explorer-based search-view-print client for use by people in departments such as manufacturing, purchasing, sales, etc.
• Multisite replication and synchronization to allow companies to easily share and collaborate using native Inventor (and other types of files) across multiple locations

Finally, Vault Manufacturing adds the capability to do item management, engineering change orders, bills of material and ERP integration.

We strongly urge all of our existing Vault customers to take a look at and consider upgrading to at least Vault Workgroup. It adds some additional basic document management capabilities that many clients have been asking for.  Also, any of you who have been operating in a mixed Vault/Productstream environment will probably want to talk with us about plans for moving forward.

 

This page last edited on Thursday, June 03, 2010